


Don’t believe in the existence of angels

by skelebro (aellos)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-15 08:15:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8048989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aellos/pseuds/skelebro
Summary: Allura prepares herself for a royal dinner and Shiro does his best to help.





	Don’t believe in the existence of angels

**Author's Note:**

> Thank u 2 all who put up with me yelling about royal jewels for hours <3 the stars in the hair are based on Empress Elisabeth of Austria and her diamond stars!

Allura is resting her chin on her hands when he walks in. Her eyes are open, staring in the mirror, looking past her own reflection. He can see the line of her neck where her hair is pulled to the side. They’re meant to be having a team meeting in their shared parlour before they head down to the official reception dinner, but Allura hadn’t turned up. Shiro pauses in the door.

She’s sitting at a vanity, white to match the walls and floor and bed and curtains and - everything in the room, apparently, lots of complicated filagree and glittery inlaid stone. Allura is a point of clarity: she’s wearing a deep blue dress, plush and velvety even from a distance. It’s cut sharp and severely down her back, revealing the long arrow of her spine. Maybe before Shiro would have called the dress _night sky blue_ , but he’s seen too much of night and knows it to be a pure, unforgiving black. This is something kinder and warmer.

Shiro clears his throat. Allura turns, her face half in shadow. Shiro is struck by her, as he often is, suddenly feeling caught and pinned by the weight of her attention - not physical, as such, but the weight of realisation of her true meaning and power. She’s the goddamn saviour of the universe and he’s her right hand man.

She smiles, not the diplomat smile, the tight, refined one, but the one with teeth, the one where he can see the glint of her canines. He breathes again.

“Come on in, I won’t be long, I promise,” she says, waving him in. It scares him, sometimes, watching her transform like this; going from the Allura they know, who’ll have food fights and foot races and wrestle him half to death, to someone dignified, to the Princess Allura who can hold galaxies in her mind and make promises she knows she’ll keep. It feels a little like losing something, like watching a friend disappear. He sits on her bed, leaning back on his arms casually as she brushes her hair.

“Decided not to grace us with your presence?” Shiro asks, staring at the ceiling. He can do casual. Him and Allura are casual; they’re close friends who’ve been through hell and back together and seen each other in every sort of awkward situation. He still feels a little off-centre, though, because embarrassment goes with Allura like water goes with oil; that is, not at all. It seems to mostly give up and slink away.

Allura pretends not to hear him. Shiro knows she’s pretending, because he knows her tells; he wonders when he learnt the ear twitch and the lip bite. How many hours he’s spent accidentally, unconsciously memorising the endless iterations of her face. They all know each other so well now.

Shiro groans and flops backwards onto the big bed when she still doesn’t reply. “C’mon Princess, what’s the hold up? You don’t usually take this long to get ready.”

Allura huffs, taking the bait. “The people here care, Shiro. I-” She stops brushing her hair and turns to look at him, her concerned look tilted oddly from the bed. He sits up. She’s usually never concerned about all the diplomat stuff. It seems to come so naturally to her, rising up from somewhere inside until she tucks it around herself like an invisible cloak. Shiro can’t remember the last time he saw her this worried about some silly dinner.

“Hey,” he says, hauling himself up. “It’s gonna go fine. I know the team can be a handful, but they’re on best behaviour.”

Allura turns back to the mirror. He’d noticed when they’d first landed and had an informal welcome how she’d eyed the jewels and shine of their hosts; there was a real sequined pantsuit happening, Shiro is pretty sure. Shiro wonders if Allura is ashamed of them all - it wouldn’t be the first time anyone on the team has done something to attract negative attention, that’s for sure. Shiro isn’t good at the social intricacies, the endless ways to stuff up a conversation with an alien culture. The current hosts seem fairly welcoming, even if it is a strange planet, one of the infinite miracles where he can breathe and see a place just close enough to earth as to be unnerving. The alien kingdom they’d found here reminds Shiro a lot of Allura, honestly, everyone all tall grace and unreadable looks, but clearly Allura can read something in it all that Shiro can’t, because she’d made Lance and Coran go deep in the Castle storage for an old chest of hers. It’s sitting at the foot of her bed, open. There’s important things happening that Shiro can’t decipher.

“Shiro, could you fetch the jewel box from the chest?” she murmurs, tying her hair up in a bun easily, deftly.

“Oh -” Shiro jumps, feeling caught out at staring at her hands. “Yeah,” he says, and opens it on his way, pausing behind her. The box isn’t that big, just clean white rectangle, but inside is a necklace with what look to be diamonds, clear and infinite mirrored light, and pink and yellow stones that Shiro can’t identify. There’s three of the clear stones, each almost as big as an eyeball, with clusters of the other stones around them. There’s earrings as well.

“Ah ah,” Allura says, smile in her voice as she takes the box. “No peeking.”

She clips on the earrings and they come alive, floating gently, the pink stones twirling lazily and arcing off light. She holds the necklace out for Shiro, eyes on him.

Shiro isn’t embarrassed around Allura: why would he be? He’s an adult who’s lived the lives of many and there aren’t many things left that could scare him, and yet. Shiro presses his fingers to his palm, thinking, trying not to let himself feel unbalanced by these Alluras, all these different layers of a person coalescing in front of him. Princess Allura Does Not Flirt.

Shiro allows himself to take the necklace - heavy, he notes absentmindedly - and stands behind her to carefully lay it at her throat. Shiro meets her eyes in the mirror and feels his stomach drop, adrenalin in his throat. Her eyes are wide and blue and sharp, always too sharp.

Shiro clasps the back, runs his hand over the cool surfaces, his fingers almost on her skin. The necklace is large and weighty, makes her throat look narrow and delicate, but she carries it with ease. He looks up from the line of her collarbone back to her face, her eyes, the electricity in them. She stares back at him as she carefully tilts her head to the side.

He waits a beat, wonders if he’s misinterpreting, touches two fingers to the side of her neck. Her eyes drift closed. Shiro removes his hand before she can realise it’s shaking.

He doesn’t step back. He doesn’t feel like he can; sometimes Allura has her own gravity about her, pulling him in. Allura reaches up and undoes her hair, letting it fall down her back, and Shiro reaches out, reaches through it until the warm skin of her back is against the warm skin of his left hand. It feels sacrilegious, almost, to touch her so casually.

“Relax,” she says, startling him, and he withdraws his hand.

“Sorry,” he says, and it comes out hoarse. Something about it is funny. Maybe it’s the situation, the sudden break in tension, but when he looks at her in the mirror she’s grinning, and then they’re both laughing at each other.

“I mean it,” Allura murmurs, braiding the front parts of her hair, tucking them up and pinning them. “Relax, Shiro. I will not break if you touch me.”

It’s not you I’m worried about, he doesn’t say.

She kissed him once, months ago, and he hasn’t really recovered. Desire is a strange, animal thing, and it’s hard to consolidate with the alien royalty in front of him. He didn’t even know his Galra hand could shake, but the tremors hadn’t left for a week.

She finishes tying parts of her hair up and picks up something glittery from in front of her - it’s a star, Shiro realises, small and made of inlaid pink stones.

“Stop standing about like a lunk and help me,” Allura says, waving a star over her shoulder. Shiro grabs in hastily.

“What do you want me to do with it?” he asks, rests his mechanical hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t flinch. Shiro knows it is not an easy task to support the weight of said arm, but she seems more preoccupied with sorting the arrangement of gold and pink stars in front of her.

“Just clip it in any old place, it’ll be fine,” she says, watching herself in the mirror as she clips her own array at the front to form a tiara. He carefully clips the first one on and Allura doesn’t give any indication that he’s hurt her or anything, so he picks up another and continues. They work in silence for a while, Shiro reaching around her to pick out the stars and carefully separating parts of Allura’s hair to be pinned with the star. It looks like a fairly even arrangement, Shiro decides, the stones catching the light gently, reflecting shimmers of gold and rose amongst her curls. He swallows and looks up. She’s looking back at him in the mirror.

“Hmm,” she says, smile growing, fiddling with the remaining stars. Shiro follows her gaze to his own outfit - a simple white undershirt with a black jacket, something like a suit, he guesses, only with rhinestones on the lapels and shoulders. It’s a little too Las Vegas Ritz for him, but it’s what the locals had left for him in his room, so he’d assumed it’s fine.

“What? Is there something wrong?” he says, fiddling with his cuffs. She shakes her head and turns.

She settles herself in front of him and he smiles. She’s just. Really pretty. He gets so overwhelmed sometimes, especially when she’s like this, regal in every sense of the word, dripping with light, her face turned up towards his. She’s got such a nice nose, Shiro thinks absently. Underneath all this, all the respect and affection and tenderness and awe, all the tremors in him, the fear, too, of what this could be, there’s a simple truth he can’t shake: he’ll always think she’s really, really pretty. There’s no armour he can build that’ll stop her from being able to reach out and pull him closer, her hand near his ribs, his soft vulnerable parts, and all he feels is sweaty on the back of his neck and the urge to lean into her. She clips one of her stars to his lapels.

“There,” she says, resting her hand against his chest as she stands with a rustle of material. The dress is close cut, minimalist, not gaudy like some of the outfits he’d seen earlier. She reaches beside the vanity and pulls out a scabbard, a long, silver sheath for her rapier sword, the swept hilt with matching pink and gold stones. She drapes the thin silver chain around her hips and the sword floats, bumping a little against her side as she makes sure the chain is settled.

He grins at her. She scares the living daylights out of him and it’s fantastic. “Feeling better?”

She rolls her eyes a little, takes a deep breath. “Yes, actually.” There’s a pause.

This is where you kiss her, Shiro, he thinks, and it’s so close, beyond close, like a reality pressing in against their own, palpable in the moment.

He goes to reach out, stops. She looks at him and twitches her mouth, then reaches for his left hand. Her hands are so warm. This isn’t the time; they’ve got to hustle the team together and get down to the reception and Allura has the performance of a lifetime to put on, just like usual. The moment slips away, like an asteroid swinging close enough to kill and then looping away, its burning heat leaving them a little out of breath.

“Come on, Shiro,” she says, and he lets her take his arm in hers and turn him towards the door. She leans up and presses a kiss to his cheek. He squeezes her hand and she squeezes right back. She’s a Princess and General and friend and leader and his literal lifesaver on more than one occasion and right now she’s just Allura, the woman that Shiro couldn’t stop loving if the universe depended on it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading ^_____^ any feedback appreciated !!


End file.
